Sachin Jain on the challenges of data literacy, AI, and medicine’s uncomfortable relationship with math
Sachin Jain, President and CEO of SCAN Health Plan, shared a post on LinkedIn about a paper he co-authored with colleagues published in JAMA Internal Medicine:
“For more than a decade, there’s been a powerful movement in healthcare to ‘liberate data’ to help inform research, improve public health, and make better clinician decisions.
Giants like Aneesh Chopra, Todd Park, and Aman Bhandari led the charge in the early days of the Obama Administration – and groups like AcademyHealth have worked to elevate the importance of making healthcare data a public good.
This movement stands only to accelerate in the days ahead as artificial intelligence accelerates our ability to curate data for rapid analysis.
As optimistic as I am about the power of data to improve health, I do worry about the low state of data literacy – reflected in the fact that even the data we have available today is underutilized or misused in the course of decision-making.
One need not look farther than our fractured public discourse – often grounded in misapplications and misinterpretations of data – to recognize the depth of the challenge.
A decade ago, Arjun Manrai, Gaurav Bhatia, Isaac Kahane, Judith Strymish and I wrote a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine, ‘Medicine’s Uncomfortable Relationship with Math,’ highlighting the low statistical literacy of physicians – a group trusted to interpret data every single day.
What’s the answer? Less data?
Of course, not.
But the learning and development groups within organizations of all sizes should be focused on raising data literacy at every level of organizations – a hard task, no doubt.
Many people in charge of organizations went to school in an era where data analysis and statistics were given less importance than other subjects.
The result?
Many people who should be more aggressively using data in making decisions avoid it altogether.
The artificial intelligence revolution will make more data available than ever before to improve healthcare.
Let’s prepare to make the most of it by making sure that people actually know what to do with it.”
“Medicine’s Uncomfortable Relationship With Math”
Authors: Arjun Manrai, Gaurav Bhatia, Isaac Kahane, Judith Strymish, Sachin Jain.
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